The Life of Lucy Stone. Alice Stone Blackwell

for how can one who has ever known the love of God go so far away? Will brother sometimes pray for me?

      "It was decided in our Literary Society the other day that ladies ought to mingle in politics, go to Congress, etc., etc. What do you think of that?"

      Lucy often said that, if women could secure education and the right to speak, they could win everything else for themselves.

      She finally accumulated money enough to enter Mount Holyoke Seminary. That institution was much interested in foreign missions, and many of the teachers and students kept mite boxes in which they collected money for that work. Lucy kept, instead, one of the mite boxes of the Anti-Slavery Society, which bore a picture of a kneeling slave holding up manacled hands, with the motto, "Am I not a man and a brother?" Bowman sent her the Liberator, and, after reading it, she used to place it in the reading room of the Seminary. No one knew who put it there, but Lucy was suspected, because of her strong antislavery views, and, when questioned, she frankly admitted it. Mary Lyon summoned her to a private interview and talked to her very seriously. She said, "You must remember that the slavery question is a very grave question, and one upon which the best people are divided."

      Lucy spent only three months at Mount Holyoke. Then her sister Rhoda died. Her mother was so heart-broken that her health failed, and Lucy went home to comfort and help her.

      Meanwhile the struggle for the right of women to speak and to take part with men in antislavery work kept on. It is easy to imagine the feelings with which Lucy must have read the report of the World's Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840. The Call had invited delegates from all antislavery organizations. A number of the societies in America elected women among their delegates. Despite the efforts of Wendell Phillips and many others, the convention refused to accept their credentials. Garrison had been delayed at sea. When he arrived and found that the women delegates had been rejected, he refused to take his own seat in the convention, and during the ten days of its discussions and votes upon a subject so dear to his heart, he sat in silence in the gallery, with the excluded women.

      One of the delegates was the distinguished Quakeress, Lucretia Mott. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was also present, not as a delegate, but as the young wife of a delegate, Henry B. Stanton. Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Stanton took long walks together, mingling their indignation; and they determined that some day, after their return to America, they would hold a convention for woman's rights. Eight years later they carried out their plan.